The Project of Supersession.

America is in something of a transition period, a period where the material
poverty of the ghetto has not yet hit a majority of workers but where any
future riches are realistically out of our reaches. We wish to discuss
the possibilities and traps faced by those who are thus thrust outside
normal existence. This applies to those who suddenly see the futility of
maintaining today's illusions without tomorrow's rewards as well as those
affected by the end of "normal life" itself.

The Eastern Airlines strike shows the realizations some people now have.
One striker remarked how many strikers did not expect to win higher wages
or even keep their jobs but that they realized they had nothing to lose;
the concessions demanded by Eastern and Frank Lorenzo would make working
at Eastern no privilege at all, no better than any job you could get. Why
not quit? Why not make it a strike? The feeling of letting go will be tremendously
important for tomorrow's revolution.

A banality that has been repeated for the last fifteen years is "America
has become conservative". This has a certain grain of truth to it. But
America is still not what it was 30 years ago. Instead, as more and more
people have been driven to the edge, economically and socially, all social
instability can more easily be papered over by the spectacle's picture
of "life in America". What is missing from the spectacle's map is the number
of hungry youths and children in our cities.

Today normalcy again reigns over daily life but does not rule. A larger
and larger group cannot fit that normalcy. Everyone is supposed to return
to "traditional values", even as they become impossible to uphold. On one
level, this gives people some leeway to reconstruct their lives, on another,
it creates a boiling anger.

A break-through is visible on the horizon but comes no closer. Punk
Rock, Hip Hop, Rap, and Heavy Metal are all founded on anger. These movements
try to merchandise an escape from normal life. But youth revolt is now
normal. The "alternative culture" is growing larger and larger, even while
it stays invisible or within society's bounds. The "sixties", "seventies",
and "eighties" all co-exist within the merchandise; lost revolts are continually
lost over-again. In Greil Marcus' pre-packaged best seller, Dada becomes
punk, Surrealism becomes the Beatles, and the Lettrist International becomes
an old Elvis Presley movie.

While revolutionaries must look for ways to go beyond these kinds of
commodities, the extent of this anger shows how frayed the country's social
fabric has become. In Berkeley, California, where "community organizing"
is a cottage industry, the most notable upsurge lately came when young
consumers, a group with no community, used the cover of a political rally
to smash and loot stores on Friday night.

Still, going beyond normal rebellion requires that today's social dislocations
come together as a conscious movement; an insurgent culture. We will be
looking at various factors and methods that could come together to create
a culture capable of breaking apart the illusions of the present society.
At present, the more capable a group is of superseding this society, the
more tentative it is. The most advanced tendencies of this society now
suffer the greatest defeats. This situation is repeated in a banal way
within the adolescents' search for "meaning in life". Hopes of unfettered
enjoyment and imagination appear but are immediately submerged in jealousy,
and merchandise.

In the following articles we will be looking at projects that the revolutionary
proletariat might use to get beyond the normal traps that have already
been constructed for it. These are activities that exist before a full-scale
revolt takes place. They are naturally doomed to more failure than success.
But these tentative actions may help ignite full scale challenges to the
system.

Superseding Education

Automation puts knowledge and learning in a different perspective. One
important contradiction of capitalism is that it devalues the process of
labour even as it creates the means to extract more labour power. In the
case of learning, books and then computers are the most obvious technologies
for devaluing rote activity. This tendency ultimately leaves those areas
that are outside mechanical reproduction as the most important human traits
for acting in the world.

This is where the contradictions between the means of production and
relations of production appears. The revolutionary proletariat is the group
that can take advantage of this. Today new ways of living and thinking
exist but are used only marginally. One approach is to allow all academic
subjects to be easily understandable to "outsiders"; to abolish experts
this way.

Several factors stand in the way of this. One is the secret language
that is used by experts. A more important problem is the incompetence that
big words and education, in general, makes people feel.

The figures on the average level education of Americans are interesting
if we realize that most of this education is useless. What has been created
by education today is a long road which most people get thrown off of at
some point. No one can respect the rote learning of school. The student's
planned defeat is used to justify her (or his) future powerlessness. Workers
are taught to respect education by being proven ignorant. A respect for
education by itself is an impediment to actual understanding. Even simple
factual learning requires taking an initiative that authoritarian schooling
denies.

The calculus teacher of Stand and Deliver, who taught ghetto kids calculus
better than private schools, showed the vast gulf between education and
learning. This not to say that we are concerned with improving the public
schools. It merely illustrates the way in which barriers to knowledge are
socially-made. SAT, CTBS, and other tests are exactly the ladders of learning
that cripple a students ability to play with concepts. These tests are
like races in PE. Since only one person can win, the best approach is for
everyone to slack off.

In America, where there is a partially "merit based" education system,
the "class structure" is partially a structure of attitudes. Conforming
to intellectual authority becomes, over time, having no identity but the
system while rebelling gives people an identity with a place and a group;
gives the working class an identity.

This relates to the decay of America's social structure. There has always
been an anti-intellectual "rebel" attitude that merely perpetuated the
status quo. Passive resistance to "learning" might be better than sucking
up to the teacher. But neither way empowers a person. The more distanced
students feel from ideas, the more the process of interacting with ideas
becomes a matter of work, of sacrificing yourself for an abstract ideal.

America's intelligentsia is becoming more and more diffuse. We can see
a more reactionary feeling of privilege in the few people who actually
go to college and get a job in "their" field but this is a smaller and
smaller number. A slight majority of Americans (60%) have been exposed
to some college but most of them find no use for it. Those who have some
learning but can see that they will never be "knowledge professionals"
have the possibility of putting their knowledge to a better use.

This situation creates an opportunity for those who are not willing
to play this losing game any more. Instant information retrieval confirms
the same theories of dialectics. The use of intelligence must be its value.

Relative to present day education, there is possibility of creating
a new type of learning. It is easy enough to see how homework, practice
exercises and tests are merely socialization the information factory and
have little to do with learning.

Looting, the most reflexive act of many rebellions going on around the
world, exemplifies the play of things that will be mandatory in a new society.
All past production can be taken to used as we will. Rap's use of existing
sound illustrates the plagiarism that will have to be the basis of future
expression. The new thinkers must steal ideas openly and gleefully. There
is the possibility of certain people short-circuiting the educational system.
They would move up to radical theory without the standard period of educational
journeymanship that often cripples most would-be radicals.

This Radical theory emerges as the will to question everything. Those
who are willing to take ideas find they have far more than those accept
the opportunities of todays societies.

The Affects of Revolt

Vague "New Age" revolutionaries tend to envision revolution as a "liberation
of feelings." This idea of revolution is much the same as the capitalists'
"liberation" of the means of production. The progress is only progress
toward the ultimate perfection of capitalism, the commodification of everyday
life.

While it is true that the struggle for liberation will take place on
more than just the level of an intellectual demand, the ideas that certain
feelings in themselves serve to change society is laughable. Pop psychologists
have found ways to sell every imaginable type of "liberatory" emotion.
But the "feel-good" therapies of the seventies were no more progressive
than the horror movies of the eighties.

As an opposite we will be considering how the entire movement of affects,
the ordering of the self. This, most importantly, has been transform by
the same political economy that has transforming material survival for
200 to 300 years.

Capital has reached a point where all emotions have a role within the
system of consumption. The extension of the rule of capital far beyond
the time when it was historically progressive has had the effect of forcing
capital to implement all the reforms first demanded by proletarian revolutionaries.
But it has implemented them in the most reactionary manner possible. The
decomposition of the family, a worthy goal in itself, is being carried
out in a way that leaves people trapped in the atomized world of the commodity.
At present, a large percentage of children are being raised by single mothers.
Regardless of their class origin, these children will experience the same
the oppression that women in general are subject to. The family's coercion
has reappeared on the level of commodities and economic black-mail; the
search for "relationships" combined with more and more state care for children.

Instead of people loosing their repressive ties to the sex and age roles
originally defined by the family, they become tied to equivalent roles
sold by the advertising and hierarchy of this society. With the crisis
of capital, these roles are in constant conflict with each other. Many
boys are pumped into an aggressive fury by the meanness of the situation.
Girls are victimized by imagines of thinness to the point of annorexia.
They can also learn the manipulations that are sold on soap operas as compensation
for their general powerlessness in society.

The crisis of capital creates a situation where the various affects
come into open conflict. The gut rage produced by this society is packaged
into sports, gangs, and attacks on foreigners. At the same time, the system
of emotional repression is ill-managed. Gang fights only benefit capital
indirectly (whether the gangs are neighborhood gangs or third world revolutionary
gangs). The hatred that work and consumption produce is not deeply rooted,
it appears as free floating hatred, which is most visible driving on the
freeway.

We have a crisis of the over-production of affects.

The over-all confusion creates a number of separate emotional cases, some
moving closer to liberation, others taking up the roles of society too
well and becoming free lance bullies. In an average school yard all these
type are visible with the school playing family only in so much as to prevent
any positive association from arising. This social alienation builds up
to create a constant social/sexual tension that dominates many adult relationships.

Social behavior is frozen into a number of separate roles. Tom boys
and sissies, children who refuse to act out the dominant clichés,
feel the most elemental violence. The chains of monogamy connect all the
controlling roles of this society.

Social violence forms many of the bonds of these frozen relationship.
The paranoia that results from the emergence of sensuality is a constant
force that acts against the progression into free association. Women, especially,
are only safe knowing that there will be no puncturing of social decorum.
This fear is entirely justified given that social aggression is dominant
motive among virtually all men in this society (being "revolutionary" makes
little difference in this). This paranoia is one of the strongest forces
within any ostensibly revolutionary grouping.

Overall, what we have is the inability of the implied roles of this
society to integrate with each other; the outcome of a person's life is
decided on an absurd auction block of jobs, relationships and TV; the disposition
of jobs that are supposed to decide the direction of a person's life is
decided in moments.

The results of this alienation has naturally been distorted by the increasing
impoverishment of this society. Although America is not yet on the level
of Mexico, the decline in the standard of living and the social support
network is moving it in that direction. The same number of people run away
now as ran away from home twenty years ago. This means that conditions
have gotten much worse at home, since life on the streets has also gotten
much harder. The murders or teen suicides tell a sad story that is "inexplicable"
to today's commentators.

We wish to create projects that take advantage of the over-all mismanagement
of emotions without falling into the trap of producing chaos, without being
part of the anarchy of production. We are acting on the assumption that
the system is producing its own grave diggers. For us, it is not important
that a person is unable to adjust to the demand of this society, although
it naturally can create great distress in a persons life. The new life
naturally begins at the point where the old way of living becomes impossible.

When survival is impossible, life can begin. Only when relationships
can reconstitute themselves outside of survival, can they become fluid
again.

The SI documented how the anger of the Watts ghetto was turned into
a sense of community at the point of a revolt against capitalism. We will
be contributing to making the existing anger more coherent, showing ways
to unify it within the present struggle (see "Good Drug/Bad Drug").

Small Group Behavior

The theory of the small social group at first seems very important. It
is easy to say that all the questions of human relations exist within a
small group. At the same time, the reality of small groups, especially
those that are ostensibly committed to change, is very depressing. Today
scientist have shown that they are very predictable (even not considering
leftists). This predictability is the same as unconsciousness - their unconscious
character is exactly what would allow the follies of youth can be charted
exactly - Done first in a reactionary [artistic] way in novels like Catcher
In The Rye and now possible as a revolutionary act.

One way to escape the trap of unconsciousness is to make a systematic
survey of how groups behave. Like the psychogeography of the SI, this kind
of survey includes the subjective and objective experience of the group
members. Although it is willing to use even the findings of standard psychology,
it supersedes the laboratory and creates a new way of living.

The Lautreamonte's project, replacing subjective poetry with objective
poetry, can be realized this way. This will serve to map a small part of
the realm outside managed society.

Certain theses will naturally come into existence concerning the life
span of informal, political groups that are not yet conscious. Here then
are various unconfirmed projects and results concerning the social/psychological
trajectory of these groups and how to supersede it.

1. Political arguments define a game and a territory. This territory
has little to do with subject discussed but much to do with the power relations
of the people involved. To supersede politics then, it is necessary to
play conscious games and games of consciousness.

2. The groups main activities becomes to maintain themselves, primary
on the psychological and financial level.

3. The general predictability of groups comes because of the hostility
of the terrain they are on. The poverty of wage labour and exchange is
reflected on every level. Even the simple danger that cars going down the
street present to people walking makes up part of their frozen character.

4. The understanding of the political group will take place with its
supersession. For dialectics, the questions of theory are answered by practice;
the practice that will ultimately appear is the practice that will answer
all the central theoretical questions as it appears.

By the reverse reasoning, the simplistic problems of an organization
can only be solved by finding further problems for that organization to
solve. Once a "purely organizational question" appears it is a sign that
a group's practice has become reified. In other words, it is the lack of
living purpose that causes the infamous "organizational problems" of leftist
groups to surface. This can be seen in the ease with which the SI superseded
the anarchist position and chaos the SI, faced once it's own position became
ambiguous.

We must formulate problems that go beyond those formulated by the SI.
We will then have a way to bypass the debates of the SI just as the SI
bypassed the fruitless debates of the anarchists and ultra-leftists. Needless
to say, this will involve an actual project of supersession and not the
creation of imaginary goals.

At the same time an insight of the SI should be remembered; any practice
that is automatic, dull and repetitive returns radicals back to the system
that they think they are changing.

The power that our group can have is leverage; the ability to move large
amounts of things easily. Our leverage will be in the realm of ideas; we
possess the ability to treat ideas lightly, to use ideas without respect
for the intellectual property rights that normally protects them.

Our group can take advantage of those areas not accessed by the power-groups,
the weaknesses of this society that power-groups would be unwilling to
take advantage of. We are equally prepared to allow any proletarian to
use our methods for the destruction of society, by not enforcing any implicit
or explicit property rights on our theory. Our goal is to be part of an
emerging community of refusal. We will have to learn to address such a
community even before it has the strength to attack the present society
(although we recognize this community, we don't think that it is identical
to the left in any way).

The power of supersession involves the desire for play. If we have a
large area to work with, we can avoid the games of personal power that
are otherwise the only outlets people have for their creativity. To succeed
we need something of the terrain that will eventually be won by a communist
revolution (while remembering how small temporary such terrain will always
remain today).

What we also have even now is a desire for conscious living, living
where the entire brain is occupied and not just the ostensible goals of
the mind. This makes liberation is a practical necessity and not an idealistic
or religious goal.